The SMOM is an elite Roman Catholic Knighthood headed by a Grandmaster who works at the behest of the Pope. Membership is derived from Politics, Industry, Finance, Military, Intelligence, Media and Entertainment. Knights and Dames first swear loyalty to the Pope and then to their country. "Defending the faith" and helping fellow members while serving the Order constitutes their ethics.

Ellery Stone's early fascination with electrical apparatus shaped his later career in the electronics communications field. Stone's youthful experiences with amateur radio and ships' wireless radio equipment prepared him for his Naval Communications Service activities during World War I. He licensed ship-to-shore operators and transmitted Naval signals from California. His postwar broadcasting experiences eventually led him to become President of the Federal Telegraph Company and then Vice-President of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation.

Stone discusses his childhood love of electronics and some of his experiences during and shortly after World War I. He was associated with the Federal Telegraph Company in California in the 1910s and 1920s, working with Dr. Lee deForest at the time when he invented the vacuum tube amplifier. Federal in the 1920s became part of a several combinations of companies, eventually being acquired by ITT. At the time of the acquisition, he became an officer with ITT. A Naval Reserve officer, he served in both World Wars as an expert on communications. During World War II, he participated in the African and European campaigns. In the postwar period, he stayed with ITT was an executive and contributed to telecommunications efforts in Africa, Europe, and elsewhere. Stone was decorated by the governments of several nations.

[ DISPLAYING ABSTRACT ]Ellery Wheeler Stone, a retired rear admiral who served with the Allied military government in Italy and was a former executive of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, died Friday at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J. He was 87 years old and lived in Nutley, N.J. At the time ...

Prince Valerio Borghese, nicknamed 'The Black Prince', was among the mostnotorious fascists recruited by the United States. As the commander of a murderousanti-partisan campaign under Mussolini during the Salo Republic, Borghese withhis Decima MAS (XMAS), a Special Forces corps of 4,000 men founded in 1941and officially recognised by the Nazi High Command, had specialised in trackingdown and killing hundreds of Italian Communists. At the end of the war the partisanscaptured Borghese and were about to hang him when on April 25, 1945 AdmiralEllery Stone, US Proconsul in occupied Italy and a close friend to the Borghesefamily, instructed OSS employee and later celebrated CIA agent James Angletonto rescue Borghese. Angleton dressed Borghese in the uniform of a US officerand escorted him to Rome where he had to stand trial for his war crimes. Due tothe protection of the United States, Borghese was declared 'not guilty' at lastresort.12 CIA agent Angleton received the Legion of Merit from the US Armyfor his 'exceptionally meritorious' achievements and in subsequent years madea career as chief of CIA counter-intelligence, becoming 'the key American figurecontrolling all right wing and neo-fascist political and paramilitary groups in Italyin the post-war period'.13 In a typical development of a Cold Warrior 'only theenemy changed for Jim Angleton' after the defeat of Mussolini and Hitler, as hisbiographer notes. 'Now the hammer and the sickle replaced the crooked cross.'14

Wolff and Dulles plotted the Anglo-American redeployment of fascist operatives after the war, among them Borghese. Indeed, Wolff declared, "Where the person of Borghese and his Decima Mas is concerned, I have spoken several times . . . with a representative of Mr. Dulles." In late 1944, Rome's black aristocracy asked the Allied military governor in Italy, Vice Adm. Ellery Stone, to intervene in favor of the "terrible boy," Junio Valerio. A friend of the Borghese family and lover of a Roman baroness, Stone needed little convincing. As the partisans closed in on Borghese in May 1945, Stone instructed Angleton to warn him, which the latter did personally. On May 19, the Americans formally arrested Borghese, thus saving him from scheduled execution by a partisan firing squad.[...]The Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Wherever one turns in investigating P2, Gladio, the "black aristocracy," international terrorism, or the Nazi International, one encounters the SMOM—the Sovereign Military and Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta, known as "the Knights of St. John" or the "Knights of Malta."

They were omnipresent in the establishment of the financial and human infrastructure of modern international terrorism already during World War II, and immediately thereafter. SMOM member Baron Luigi Parilli, an industrialist with high-level connections into both Hitler's SS and SD in Italy, and to Mussolini's intelligence services, was the main liaison between SS Gen. Karl Wolff and Allen Dulles in Berne.SMOM bestowed one of its highest awards, Gran Croce Al Merito Con Placca, on U.S. Ambassador to Italy Ellery Stone, who had saved Borghese, and who became a postwar vice-president of the ITT corporation, which helped organize the Sept. 11, 1973 overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende and the installation of dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

25 April 1945 [three days before the German forces capitulate in Italy] Admiral Ellery Stone, U.S. Proconsul in occupied Italy, instructs James Angleton to rescue Prince Valerio Borghese from the possibility of arrest by the Resistance Committees which had sentenced him to death for war crimes .......... Stone is a close friend of the Borghese family.10

Borghese was to be heard from again on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (See below.)